The Helmet by Sean Monaghan

Baz liked it out this way, among the Kuiper belt planets. He imagined the vacuum quieter, the light dimmer, the drift through the cosmos more peaceful. They’d left Chuapa behind a day ago, and were six days out from Sarinne. Cleaning his circledeck display of its advertising for Nike and Amazon, he asked it to source any new messages from Stel. Nothing yet. Somehow the multi-nationals and multi-planetaries were able to encourage him to purchase footwear and books or electronics or kitchen utensils, but his girlfriend was unable to send him a simple greeting. “Baz?” Lilly said from the nav-comm station below and behind him. “Did you see that?” “See what?” he said. “Something on the scope.” Baz expanded his circledeck’s satellite screen and wiped up the ship’s external scope feeds. Video, radar, both blank. Baz sighed. Lilly spotted things on the scope too often. Eager to get back to Eris and her half-pregnant boyfriend. Working with the Sambra’s buried processor, he stripped away last week’s tracking data and looked for anything recent. Nothing but ice and rock in the last three hours, and nothing close or big enough to worry about. “You see it?” she said. “I’ve got nothing.” Automatically he looked up from the screens, through the ship’s cockpit windows. The narrow slits revealed nothing except the constant blaze of distant stars. He shivered. The cockpit was warm enough, but he could feel something coming on. Maybe a cold. The Sambra was a fifteen thousand ton, four-berth ice hound. She’d been built in the Charon yards in the early part of the century, before the 2120 biologicals took over. The original owners had too much invested in her not to let her work out the bulk of her intended economic life. By 2150 she’d been thoroughly used up and left in a high, slow orbit around Eris. Three years back Lilly had found out about her and made an offer, once she’d tracked the current owners down. Those people had barely even known the ship was on their books, but they’d still tried to negotiate Lilly’s offer up. After that she’d come to Baz with another offer. Come out with her ice gathering for three months and she’d forgive his debt. How could he refuse? If he’d known the crew compartments would stink of oil and butter chicken, and he’d be the one tasked with scrubbing the place out, he just about might have. Baz heard a click as Lilly unstrapped her harness. She clomped across the steel deck. She’d told him that one of the things she loved about the Sambra was that the ship had a singularity translator siphoning gravity in from one of the local black holes. The modern biological ships used a kind of generated artificial gravity that, Lilly said, felt wrong. It made her queasy. “There,” she said, pointing right into his satellite screen. “Beacon.” “There aren’t any beacon’s out this way.” They were more than two million kilometers from the nearest base. The only other ships were basically off-grid. “Expand that, boost the signal,” she told him. “Boost the signal.” Baz lifted the circledeck and tapped. “You don’t need to use that tone.” “I didn’t use a tone.” Baz held up the little machine. “See? I’m doing it. Boosting the signal.” Lilly sighed. On the satellite screen, Baz saw it. A steady pulse. Very low gain, not focused at all. A ship. Less than eighty thousand kilometers away. The circledeck fuzzed for an incoming message. Nokia-Apple, trying to sell him a fogfone. Following that it ditched in an update on the Knicks game. “Will you shut all that off?” Lilly said. “I’m expecting a message from Stel.” “On your own time.” “What?” Baz pushed the pilot’s chair back. “You’d take a message from Garry in a second.” “That’s different, he’s incubating.” “And how do you know that Stel’s not pregnant?” Oops, he thought as it came out. He remembered thinking it a couple of days ago as a counter-argument, but had only smiled at the whimsy. Lilly stared at him. “Do you need a basic human biology lesson? Or is she maybe pregnant with someone she’s actually seen in the last year?” Baz swallowed. It was all right for her; she would see Garry in a few weeks. It was looking like it would be another year before he’d see Stel. He almost said something about biology and a half-pregnant man, but knew it would only make things worse. “So are we going to this ship?” he said. “Of course.” Lilly reached over and snapped her fingers over his circledeck. It brought up a menu he’d never seen and she wiped away some items. The advertisement vanished. “How did you... ?” Baz trailed off. “Can you plot us an intercept?” The corporate logos and links had vanished from the circledeck screen. Other things too. The display had suddenly become uncluttered. Baz nodded. Easier to read, easier to use. “Can you?” Lilly said. She knew he could, of course. It was part of the job description. If he hadn’t been licensed and rated he wouldn’t have this opportunity to pay back the debt. And that had to be enough reason to be here. Baz touched the circledeck and had it plot a course to the beacon. “Done.” “Good.” Lilly returned to the nav-comm chair. “What’s this about?” he said. “Just do your job.” Baz huffed and threw the track onto the bigger satellite screen. No ice or rock on the route. But there was something else. Near the beacon, another signal. Lower power, less frequent. “Lilly?” “Busy here.” Baz debated whether to push it. She was so easily irked. He thought of Stel. He still needed to figure out getting back to her. If he hadn’t wrecked his own ship and screwed up the insurance, he’d be back there now. “Lilly, you should come look,” he said. “There are two signals.” “Mm-hm.” Baz looked around. She hadn’t moved out of the chair. “You knew that?” Was she watching? She’d said she didn’t want to navigate at all and had pushed all the threads up to his station. He’d had to download memory upgrades to his circledeck to accommodate it all. “I knew. I expected it.” That sent a prickle down his spine. She knew? As he watched, the second signal faded out to almost nothing. It flared and vanished. He kept watching for a moment longer but it didn’t come back. “It’s gone,” he said. Just like his ads, and, he now realized, his feed from Stel. Not that she was sending anything, but it looked like whatever Lilly had done had broken his link. “Gone?” Now Lilly got up out of the nav-comm chair. “What did you do with my Earth lines? I can’t see Stel.” Lilly came up to him. “Where was it?” Baz pointed. He felt indentured. As if her offer made him just a servant, not deserving of explanation or help. Or even simple courtesy. Lilly crouched a fraction, bending to the screen. He got a whiff of her deodorant, a musky, passion fruit mix. It reminded him of Stel. “What’s our E.T.A.?” “Ten hours, give or take.” The inertia-drive had railed them up to eighty-five hundred kilometers an hour relative speed. He could push faster, but the Sambra was old. Refurbished, but still it was an old frame, old drive. He didn’t like to think what would happen if the drive mechanism ripped out of its mountings and hurtled through the ship crushing and tearing everything in its path. “Too long. Put us there in two.” “Not possible.” Lilly backed away. “This is my ship, don’t tell me what’s not possible.” “Look, you’re talking — ” “Accelerate at, what, two gees for ten minutes.” “I’m not going to do that.” The ship would never be launched from an atmosphere: she was permanently in space. That kind of acceleration was unnecessary. And outside her design specs. “I don’t think you understand your role here,” Lilly said. “I understand just fine.” Baz unbuckled, stood and stepped away from the console. “I signed on to get paid. Not to commit suicide.” Lilly moved away too, standing to her full height. She was just taller than he was, and he found himself looking at her nose. Funny, he thought, under different circumstances he might find her attractive. “Did you forget our deal?” she said. “You pilot and navigate for me and your payment is the closure of your debt. That was an expensive ship you wrecked, lot of money owing on it.” Baz didn’t say anything. She was paying well. Almost enough to send the whole of the debt packing. Certainly enough that he could manage the rest. He’d known from the beginning that it was illegal. Hadn’t wanted to admit it to himself. Desperate, in over his head, Allied Mutual sending demand after demand. If he’d thought it through, he would have gone talked to them before he’d made his agreement with Lilly. It was just too tempting. The thought of seeing Stel again. “So here’s what we need to do. We need to get there fast.” “Sambra’s an old ship.” “I’m aware of that. She’s perfect in fact. I know you’re thinking she’ll rip apart, but she won’t.” Baz nodded, but he took another step away. The cockpit wasn’t that big; he was going to run up against a wall with his next step. “What choice do you have?” she said. Baz wobbled his head, as if weighing things up. “Maybe just stay alive.” Lilly sighed and put an arm out to lean against the back of the pilot’s seat. “I thought you had a sense of adventure.” “That evaporated when I mangled the Miekele.” Lilly stared at him for a moment. He wondered if he actually saw a little sympathy in those eyes. She had the slightest of frowns. Turning just a fraction, she looked over the pilot’s console. Her hand dropped from the seat and she moved around closer. “I know you’re a pilot,” he said. She wouldn’t have bought the ship if she didn’t know how to fly it. “I can manage. I set up the systems, I know how it works.” She looked over at him. “Technically.” Now Baz sighed. “All right then.” He stepped away from the wall to stand on the other side of the pilot’s seat. Lilly managed the faintest of smiles. “Fast,” she said. “Two hours. You should strap in.” She nodded and went back to the nav-comm seat. Baz sat and worked quickly. The vectors came up on the screen. The circledeck didn’t care if it was a rust-bucket freighter or an over-powered racing pod, it just calculated the course. • • • “You see it?” Lilly said as they came up on the rendezvous point. “No visual,” Baz said. He’d already swung the ship around to face the direction of travel, after almost an hour of stern-facing deceleration with the rail drive. The ship had survived. She’d creaked and groaned, and given off a smoky smell that was half burnt oil and half crispy bacon. He was going to have to get his olfactories checked. Along with his mind — clearly there was something loose in there. “On the screen? I’ve got it already.” “Just the one, though.” Baz adjusted the zoom on the display, taking in a wider volume. “I don’t see your other signal.” “Sporadic. Range on the main one? I’ve got thirteen kilometers.” “Likewise. We’re closing at forty meters a second, relative. I can bring us in on retros.” “Five or six minutes.” “Ten, at least.” He would be reducing their relative velocity to almost nil. “Sure,” she said. She’d calmed down since they’d made the swing at the halfway point. Mostly she’d been busy on the nav-comm station. Baz didn’t know why, but liked the lack of tension in the air. Working quickly, he set the circledeck to bring them in close. The ship shuddered as the retros blasted away, bringing the bulky vessel’s speed down. Baz put on a visor and linked it to the controls. Data sprayed up over the surface, giving him a good overlay of the ship’s surroundings. The feed picked out Centauri straight away and gave him direction and location to local bodies: Eris was the closest major at fifteen million and change, lots of smaller rocks and bergs closer. Their signal showed up as a bright red spot. The circledeck gave him artificial locked points, creating a ground plane as he guided them in. “It’s real small,” he said. The radar reflection was showing it at under a meter. Mass looked like it was below five kilograms. It didn’t make sense. “Just keep your eyes on the road,” Lilly told him. “You know what it is, don’t you?” “Not relevant.” The circledeck found a lock on the object and pulled up optics and artificial locators to build an amalgam image. The picture came up on the screen, and Baz lifted the visor to get a better look. It was a helmet. It looked like something vintage, maybe fifty or sixty years old. A kind of a fishbowl shape, the front half transparent, the back a gray-white. The neck-ring had snapped at one point and had expanded from the break to a slightly bigger circle. A short antenna came up from one ear and there was a shallow dent in the helmet as if someone had hit it with a hammer. The whole thing rotated slowly. “Whose helmet?” he said. As the approach continued, the circledeck dropped away parts of the interpolated image and filled in with actual information. The dent shifted from a circle to something more ragged. Perhaps a stone had hit it. “I don’t know whose,” Lilly said. “It’s not human.” Baz frowned. It looked human enough. Maybe Russian, or Congolese. They’d lost a few ships in those days. Strange there was no other debris on the scope. If a ship had exploded the material would disperse fast and wide, but some ought to have been on a similar trajectory to the helmet. He zoomed in a bit and had the circledeck build a full 3D render of the thing, so he could spin it around and examine it himself. “Do you think it’s worth something?” Lilly laughed. “Of course it is! Hundreds of millions, probably.” Baz glanced around at her. He was no expert on antiques, but he would have said thousands, maybe in the tens of thousands. Lilly stared at him, grinning. “I was right. How close are we?” Baz shook his head and turned back to the displays. “Five kilometers.” “I’m going out.” “Out?” Did she mean EVA? “I’d advise against that. We can grab it with Sambra’s grappling arm.” She got up from her seat. “You’re not going near it with the arm. This has to be done manually.” Baz shrugged and sighed. “Well, you’re the boss.” Lilly came and stood beside him. “You still don’t get it, do you?” She stared at the model on the screen. “Sure,” he said, shifting in the seat. She came a bit close for comfort. “There’s a helmet from a wreck. It’s broadcasting a low wattage signal that you found and now you’ve come out to get it. You’ll sell it for hundreds of millions.” “I will. Did you look at the scale?” “Scale?” “Here... ” Lilly waved keystrokes at the display and the circledeck pulled up a simple ruler beside the model. “There.” The helmet was no more than five centimeters across. He would struggle to fit his hand in it. No human head would fit. Baz’s brain started coming up with explanations. A robot, maybe. A monkey. Some other kind of animal. If the rest of the suit was around they would see that it was made for something four-legged. He didn’t want to think of the alternative. The alternative that would make the helmet worth hundreds of millions. “It’s alien,” he said. Not a question. He wanted it to be a question, a ridiculous, far-fetched question. Not a statement of fact. Something outside the ship shimmered. Light flared through the cockpit. “That’s right,” she said, staring through the narrow windows. “And I think we’ve attracted some attention.” The circledeck whined some kind of warning. It threw gibberish data up onto the screen. Lilly went around the console and pulled herself right up to the window. “I wondered if this would happen.” “What?” Baz said. He half-guessed, but didn’t even want to think about it. Alien signals had been detected already. Incoherent gibberish, but clearly the product of intelligence. This, he figured, would be the first actual artifact to show up. Baz shivered. He didn’t want to move out of his seat. Through the narrow windows, he could see that something else had shown up. A ship. It was red, with vanes and flares, gaps in the hull that seemed to be unwindowed openings looking right into the compartments and services. It was less than three hundred meters away. He could only see part of it through the window. “Guess we’re making some new friends,” Lilly said. “Friends?” Baz said. He swallowed, his throat felt dry and acidic. “Here’s hoping. I’m suiting up.” Lilly lingered at the window for a moment before turning and moving through the cockpit. “Care to join me?” Baz didn’t look away from the alien ship. “You’re going out there? Doesn’t that strike you as a bit nuts? We should just rail up and get back home. Report this. We know the ship can take it now, the acceleration.” “You have no sense of adventure.” “I have a sense of staying alive.” Lilly laughed. “I’m going out to look at the helmet. I think it’s beacon was designed for us to find.” “A helmet? Why not a sign?” He looked around at her. “Why not a probe or something less ... morbid.” The empty helmet suggested death and devastation. Dying in a vacuum was not pretty. Baz had never seen it, but he’d heard enough stories over a pitcher of beer at various bars to know that a damaged suit was a nasty way to die. Lilly shrugged and pulled open the EVA locker. “Maybe that’s their way. Leave a helmet.” “Maybe it’s the last remains of a fugitive and they’re coming to make sure he’s dead. They’re going to vaporize the whole area.” “Funny. Put on a suit.” Lilly had her suit legs on and was working on the torso. Baz took another look out through the cockpit windows. He forced himself to get over there and press up close to the glass to get a clear view. The ship spun slowly about an odd axis — not what he would have thought of as the center. As if its mass was unevenly distributed, the wider half open and empty, the back half-filled with lead. “Three minutes until I’m cycling out,” Lilly said. “Roger that.” Baz went to the console and had the circledeck use the Sambra’s external sensors to run analyses on the alien ship. Density, composition, radiation, signals, albedo... Anything he could think of that might suggest that going out of their own vessel was anything close to a good idea. Density came back at two hundred kilograms per cubic meter. The Sambra was probably twelve hundred. The alien ship would float on water while the Sambra would go straight to the bottom. Composition was mostly aluminum, boron, carbon, oxygen and hydrogen. Hydrocarbons. The alien ship was plastic. “One minute,” Lilly said. “Hold on.” Albedo was around point one five. He didn’t know how useful that was anyway. No signals, no radiation besides the thin reflected light. With a sigh, Baz undocked the circledeck. He turned from the display and pulled a set of legs from the suit locker. He knew he could suit up in under thirty seconds anyway. He sat, stuck his feet into the waist and the legs wormed their way up his. While they worked, he reached around for the torso. He slapped the circledeck onto the receptacle at center of the suit’s chest. The little unit bleeped back at him that it had linked to the suit’s onboard systems. Baz ducked his arms up through. When he was done, the waist ring sealed him in. “Hurry,” Lilly said. “It’s coming in at the helmet.” Baz stole a glance at the windows. The alien ship continued to rotate, but it was definitely closer. There was activity at one of the openings. “Get your helmet on,” Lilly said. Baz did hurry then. Snapping a hemispherical helmet into place he had the suit run an integrity check. The helmet smelled like a new car, all fresh plastic and Simoniz. He followed Lilly into the short companionway that led to the airlock. She dogged them in and cycled the lock. Baz heard the hiss of the air diminishing and felt his suit adjust to the lowering pressure. “Radio check,” Lilly said. “Check.” “Suit integrity?” “Check. Shouldn’t you do that before evacuating the lock?” Lilly laughed. Baz shook his head, feeling bumps from the helmet foam. She took his safety less than seriously. “Opening outer hatch.” Lilly turned and unlatched the external door. A puff of vapor and the door swung out on its heavy hinge. Lilly clambered out, bumping her backpack against the rim in her hurry. “You all right?” Baz said. Technically any impact like that, however minor, required cycling back in and checking the equipment. Without replying Lilly kicked away. Baz followed. “Wait up,” he said. Lilly turned and jetted off. Baz shook his head. Quickly he set the circledeck to record. Whatever happened, he wasn’t going to get back and be hauled up in front of a safety board. “Lilly, we need to run a check on your pack.” No reply. He hadn’t expected one. Pushing out he had a moment’s vertigo. He loved being out here, considered himself as spacefarer, but he never liked transitioning from the security of a ship’s interior out to deep vacuum. Kicking off the hatch edge, he felt the localized gravity diminish. He squeezed his glove and his own jets came online. He spun around and lined up on Lilly. Another squeeze and the main jet shoved his back. He matched her velocity and pushed just a fraction more to catch up. He could see the helmet, but the view was dominated by the alien ship. It looked like a giant donut without a center hole. It still spun off-center. The activity he’d glimpsed from one of the openings had extended into long spindly robotic arms stretching out for the helmet. Even with the rotation the arms stayed strangely static. Their fingery tips splayed. “They’re getting it,” Lilly said. She was only fifteen meters ahead of him. “Shouldn’t we, um, let them?” “Never.” The distance increased. She’d accelerated. She must have opened her jets up to their maximum dilation. “Lilly?” “I’m getting that artifact.” She’d reached thirty meters ahead of him. Thirty-five. Baz opened up his own jets, not as much, but he didn’t want to lose ground. “You’re just going to make them mad,” he said. “And burn out your suit.” “I’m getting it.” The alien ship’s robotic hands danced their way close to the helmet. Baz could see it clearly now, less than two hundred meters off. The visor glinted with the sun’s wan distant light. Lilly closed the distance fast. Less than a hundred meters. He jets spluttered and caught again. “How’s your fuel?” Baz said. If she accelerated too fast for too long she wasn’t going to have enough to stop and turn around. In theory, the suit’s onboard systems wouldn’t let her: it would always leave sufficient reserve to be able to arrest the momentum, with just a fraction left to return her to the ship before her air ran out. The spluttering worried him, though. If she’d damaged the suit in her eagerness to get out to the helmet things could go very badly. He imagined having to chase her with the Sambra. The alien ship suddenly stopped spinning. It was like a brake lock. The arms continued to reach out. The robotic fingers were going to reach the helmet long before she did. Her jets spluttered again and she spun around. She darted up and to the left. “Baz!” she squawked. “Coming,” he said. Squeezing his glove he adjusted his own vector. “Forget me. Get the helmet.” Baz kept his vector. “Do it.” She’d shut her jets down and was just drifting on now, not spinning. Baz saw she had something in her hands. Some kind of rod she was lining up on the robot arm. A gun? “What are you doing?” Baz squeezed a fraction more acceleration, but let up. “You’re going to have about one fiftieth of a second,” she said. “Lilly?” The rod spat something out. A glowing blue oblong ball. Static electricity arced around the ball. “Hurry,” Lilly said. The recoil had pushed her back so she was speeding away from the helmet and alien ship. The ball struck the metal fingers and exploded. Threads and tendrils splattered out, wrapping around the fingers like gum. “Go, go,” Lilly said. Baz was only thirty meters from the helmet. Closing fast. It looked like a clear window. He could see it right ahead. His mind raced. An alien space helmet. Made for a creature the size of a cat. Their ship right there. Millions of dollars. Enough to get home to Stel on the next inner system run. “You’re insane,” he told Lilly. “Who knows what these guys want?” “I know what I want,” she said. He was practically on it already. The robot fingers were struggling with the threads from Lilly’s projectile. The helmet was right there. In his hands. It bounced off his shoulder, spinning up. Baz reached and grabbed it, fumbled again. Pulled it in. “You got it,” Lilly said. “You got it!” Baz held it close. He felt like a receiver running for the touchline. He was aware of the alien ship nearby. This close he could see detail in its red hull. There were images carved into the surface, long frescoes showing strange multi-headed creatures and hunts and curving buildings. “Go, go,” Lilly said. “Get back to the Sambra.” The alien ship began to spin again. It started exactly the way it had stopped: immediately. From still, to a fast rotation without any spin-up. “Watch the arms,” Lilly said. Twisting, Baz looked back. Now the arms were winding around towards him. The threads had all been severed and were drifting off. With a squeeze he pushed his suit jets up to the maximum. A fraction of lateral thrust and he got himself angled away from the alien ship. “I’m sorry,” Lilly said. Her voice was silky, quiet. “Well, it was worth a shot,” he said. He held the helmet out in front of his own, turning the artifact around and examining it. “These guys are really little.” Lilly gave a soft laugh. Baz became aware of the robot fingers reaching around at the edge of his vision. The moved with purpose, but also with an odd kind of staccato jerking. Alien. “Baz,” Lilly said. He pulled the helmet back over his shoulder. The tips of the fingers turned, following the helmet like the heads of a pack of wolves following an escaping rabbit. Thinking of Stel, he hurled the helmet. It tumbled away from him. He would never make a quarterback, he thought. But it was enough. The fingers vanished. They lanced out past him, and the ship moved. Baz shut off his jets. “No,” Lilly said. Drifting on, Baz watched as the alien ship shifted and matched velocities with the helmet. The robot fingers reached and grabbed, pulling the helmet back. In a sudden series of jerks they withdrew into the opening and the ship vanished. Taking the helmet. Baz stared into the bleak vacuum for a moment, barely noticing the stars. “Ah well,” Lilly said. “It was worth a shot.” With a squeeze of his glove, Baz turned to look back at the Sambra. It was already a couple of kilometers behind and receding fast. “It was nice knowing you, Baz,” Lilly said. “Not so fast.” Baz grabbed the circledeck. The receptacle unreeled the little unit on a thin tether. He called up the Sambra’s systems and gave it a short burn with the chemicals. “Baz? Sambra moved.” “That’s me.” It wasn’t easy piloting the hefty ship. The circledeck was a clunky controller at best and the suit gloves hampered his movements. All he had to do, though, was increase the ship’s velocity enough so that he could get to Lilly and get her aboard. He had enough fuel in his jets to get back to the ship, or to pick her up, but not both. He could have gotten himself back aboard and then piloted to her, but this way was going to be faster. With the ship underway, he set himself a vector on her and jetted over. It only took a couple of minutes. “So this is a rescue now?” she said. “I guess.” He grabbed her into a hug and angled them both for the Sambra. Another five minutes and they were back inside the lock. “Sorry we missed it,” Lilly said as she got her helmet off. “We were so close.” “You could have told me what you were doing.” He stripped off his suit and went through to the pilot’s console where he plugged the circledeck back in. The cabin air was sweet and cool after the thick odorous atmosphere in the sweaty suit. “The signal I found,” she said. “I guess they found it too.” “I guess.” He didn’t know how. And he didn’t know why aliens would come out to get a helmet. Maybe it was some kind of non-interference thing. Or maybe they were artifact hunters like Lilly. He called the data up on the screen. “I don’t know how I’m going to pay you,” she said. “I still owe money on the ship. I know you wanted to get back home.” “Yeah.” He watched the files appear on the display. Video, telemetry, 3D analysis, vectors. The circledeck had recorded it all. He thought of Stel. “What’s all that?” Lilly said coming over to him. Baz smiled. “All the data on the ship, on the helmet. The circledeck recorded it all. It might not be worth millions, but it might finance the trip.” “Oh, boy,” Lilly said. She slumped into the pilot’s seat. “Any museum or university would pay a mint for that data.” “I figured.” “Smart thinking Baz,” she said. “I didn’t expect that.” He just thought of getting home to Stel. “Sometimes,” he said, “I can manage just a little smart thinking.”Lilly laughed, but he wasn’t listening. He was already plotting the course back to Sarinne.

Sean Monaghan - Sean Monaghan works as an educator in a busy public library. His stories have appeared in Asimovs, Perihelion and Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, among others. He was the Grand Prize winner in the 2014 Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest. Web: seanmonaghan.com